Ever watch those private investigator shows where the main character of the show also seems to catch their suspect(s)?
Have you ever been inspired by such shows to want to be a private investigator yourself? Well, you don’t have to imagine anymore, you can actually be doing the same work that you’ve seen all the TV sleuths do, you can actually be a private investigator.
Private investigators, known as PIs for short, are in effect privately-hired police officers chosen to handle special cases that requires special expertise. They are not your typical police officers that most of us are familiar with.
View our guide for how to become a Private Investigator.
Where do Private Investigators Work?
PI’s are usually hired out by firms or individuals of means to investigate certain cases, such as murder under mysterious circumstances, corporate fraud and the like. Private investigators are paid well-very well. They are not paid by the hour, they are paid by the cases they successfully solve, which can be from a few thousand dollars to tens of thousands of dollar per case.
You can see why now this is such a prestigious career that it’s only for a relatively select few. One of those select few might be you-if you take advantage of the educational opportunities this prestigious field offers to all who are interested. Like any other profession, you must must be adequately trained, and there are many schools that features courses in investigative study and police sciences.
Course Selection
You, the prospective private inspector, has to decide which courses are practical for you to take and which one fits your schedule and budget. You can either attend on-campus classes that teach such above courses or you can study fro such courses online, which seems to be the popular trend among many of today’s students.
Some of the courses or steps involved you will learn was indicated earlier, such subjects as police sciences, which will go into all of the aspects of what is involved in being a police officer, which discusses criminal psychology, which deals with understanding how a criminal thinks and reasons and how you, as a prospective PI can use your powers of sound judgment to determine who or who is not the suspect(s) or culprit(s) involved.
Special Skills
You will also learn such things as forensic sciences, or the study of the nature of the kind of crime involved, particularly its more graphic or grislier aspect, much like what you might see on popular TV cop shows like CSI or Criminal Minds, for instance.
Some may argue that these are only TV shows, but as the saying goes, ‘life imitates art’ and vice versa. And of course you will also learn regular, conventional science as well; much in solving crimes involves understanding basic sciences, such as understanding the DNA pattern, which has often been highly instrumental in apprehending criminal, especially murders and rapists.
And you will also need to understand basic as well as more complex aspects of mathematics; you need to determine when and how a victim was murdered or assaulted, at what angle a victim was shot, with what kind of gun, the degree their bodies lie on the ground and so forth.
Final Certification and a Career as a Private Investigator
When you successfully complete your course, you will then be awarded and granted a special certification that certifies you to serve as a fully-licensed private investigator, to which you will be granted with a legitimate police badge and a identification card that clearly identifies you as a private investigator.
You will then be dutifully certified to fight crime and have the authority to arrest criminal and suspects working in conjunction with your local police department.
Then your dream of being a private investigator will be over; you’ll be one for real-and you can actually catch criminals or criminal suspects for real-just like you see on PI shows.